What types of jobs and workplaces are wearables most suitable for?

PA Consulting Group’s Simon Hall, a wearable technology expert, is interviewed by the Financial Times as part of a series of videos and features on wearables in the workplace.

Simon begins by explaining PA’s health patch: “PA has developed a ‘health patch’ which is a platform technology, meaning it has been designed to monitor a range of health and wellbeing indicators.” He outlines how PA “tried to build something very small, and very cheap and that could be made at very high volume.”

Simon goes on to explain some of the benefits of the health patch: “This technology can then be used to sense things like activity and sleep patterns and can look at some areas of skin capacity.”

He explains that the key benefit of the patch is that it can be tuned to different conditions. “It can be used in various mental health and physical conditions and things like diabetes and hypertension…. and it gives us a head start when we are looking at how we might address either supporting a clinical trial or [gaining] some real world evidence into any of these disease conditions. The idea is that you can make them in their hundreds of millions for about the price of a daily paper,” explains Simon.

Simon then goes on to talk about how wearables might be used in the workplace: “We think that the application of wearable technology in the workplace is highly dependent on the type of work that you do. We are not very convinced [of its use] for the average office worker.”

However, Simon sees a number of specific workplaces where wearables will be used: “Where we think it’s very useful is in high impact environments where the individual wearing the technology has to perform a task in a way where it’s sensitive to having both of your hands available, or where it’s a high risk environment like a power station. These are situations where the individual is relied upon heavily to react in a certain way or their own wellbeing, their physiology is important to the task.”

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